When was the last time you allowed your inner world to be expanded? How did you do that? Perhaps in a discussion group where people were bringing completely diverse ideas and opinions that reshaped your own? Or within a meditation where the normal rational mind was left behind at least for a time and new ideas emerged.
The temptation when things feel a bit unfamiliar or even overwhelming can be to revert to the tried and tested – drawing on past experiences where they seem helpful – and/or battening down the hatches and keeping ourselves ‘safe’. Sometimes, our animalistic fight or flight instincts can kick in and we may step forward and confront, or find we are accessing emotions such as anger, frustration, even despair that somehow give us a locus around which to focus ourselves – almost a false safety.
What if we choose a different pathway? A pathway where we expand our perceptive field and see the situation(s) within a much bigger context. How big shall we go? Well that depends on how successfully we can let go of the beliefs, ideas, thoughts that have held us ‘safe’ up to this point. What if we allow ourselves to travel more lightly and with less of the past weighing us down, however good it may have been….then.
Opening ourselves to accept the ‘now situation’ and entering into a deep curiosity about new ways of seeing it, new possibilities, new truths is deeply liberating if somewhat uncomfortable to start with. As we leave the safe shores of our known world, perspective, attitudes and beliefs, we create a freedom for a new level of insights to emerge. We may do this in lively discussion, we may find it by reading more diverse material or with diverse friendship groups, we may find it through travel and contact with different cultures and philosophies.
Opening to new perspectives and possibilities can be a deeply spiritual journey because it creates the freedom to sense what we truly know and want to live by – and if we choose this as a way of life, we remain fresh, vital and mobile in our perspectives rendering us far more creative and able to cooperate with the here and now. Truly ‘knowing’ something is a very delicate practice and one where we need to have tested the idea from many perspectives before being able to say we ‘know’ and therefore we act from that place.
The beauty of deep knowing is that when it strikes, it strikes from such a profound place that it, in turn, opens new perspectives and ways of seeing the world.